25 October 2006

Shampagne charlies...

So, as we mentioned, TWL attended the PR Week Awards last night. Turns out that cooking duck for 1,500 braying PR professionals isn't very easy. Who'd have thought it?

You can read through all the winners on the PR Week website (there are photos too...oh dear) but the biggest award of the night - the very last lump of chrome and plastic to be given away - is the Gold Award for Campaign of the Year.

Now, the campaign of the year is picked from the winners of all the separate campaign awards, so we knew the candidates already...and there were some very worthy ones. There was a campaign to improve numeracy skills amongst men, there was one from the Alzheimer's Society, one highlighting the critical need for kidney donations, a campaign to improve the quality of food labelling, one from the team who managed the impact of the London bombings on British tourism and one from Cancer Research UK...amongst others.

And (drum roll please) you'll be delighted to hear that the winner of the 2006 PR Week Award for Campaign of the Year was...umm...Cake Group, for its launch of the Nintendogs game for the Nintendo DS.

Yep, that's right. The great and the good of the UK PR industry (or at least those on the judging panel) decided that the pinnacle of PR execution over the past year was the launch of a video game about dogs.

Opportunity missed? You decide. Didn't make me feel great (but that might've been the duck).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Presumably the award is for the excellence of creativity, execution and results - not worthiness? I don't think PR Week are to blame if you don't feel great about yourself.

PS - No connection to Cake, PR Week or (sadly) any of this year's winners or nominees.

....the world's leading.... said...

Ummm, I don't remember saying that I didn't feel great about myself - no problem there! Nor did I blame PR Week.

But, leaving those inaccuracies aside, you're right of course. In isolation, I'm sure the Nintendogs campaign did indeed show the greatest levels of creativity, superb execution, fantastic results...probably had an enormous impact on the game's sales and added significantly to Nintendo's revenue. Which is nice.

Anonymous said...

Let's be honest these awards are great to get but anyone that truly thinks they won because they ran the best campaign on the planet is barking. Winning awards is a skill just like getting good coverage for an average client is. That's why the bigger agencies all have people doing this full time. Well done to Cake for showing the big guys how it's done. There is no way it was the best campaign but it was clearly the best entry.

Anonymous said...

Personally I think Beedogs should have won it:

http://www.beedogs.com/

Far more creative ;-)